Candidate Ran M.T.A. (He Doesn’t Dwell on It.)

Joseph J. Lhota campaigned last week outside a subway station in Forest Hills, Queens.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Not so long ago, Joseph J. Lhota would swagger through subway stations with an eye toward chipped paint and trash on the tracks — an executive surveying his stock, which was, in this case, New York City’s transit system.

On a recent afternoon in Forest Hills, Queens, less than eight months after he resigned his post as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to pursue a run for mayor, Mr. Lhota mined the station for undecided voters.

The going was slow.

“Joe Lhota for mayor,” he said halfheartedly, offering fliers and handshakes that were, as often as not, rebuffed. He signed one autograph. He high-fived two children. He waved to a transit worker, then turned to his small entourage — “you see the M.T.A. guy?” — when the worker waved back.

When a heckler arrived, recognizing Mr. Lhota at the top of a station staircase, the candidate mustered no response.

Mr. Lhota’s yearlong tenure as chairman of the transportation agency is one of his most recognized credentials as he now runs for mayor as a Republican. The rapid restoration of subway service after Hurricane Sandy won him widespread praise, and propelled him into the public eye, and then, onto the campaign trail.

But he seldom trumpets his tenure managing the authority, which, although indispensable to New York City, is also unloved. Asked at a recent debate to list his relevant experience for the job of mayor, he cited stints on Wall Street and as a deputy mayor to Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Beyond the storm, Mr. Lhota’s record at the helm of the nation’s largest subway system was complicated, marked by nimble political calculations and, occasionally, unforced errors.

He slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from the authority’s budget and restored many services of the agency for the first time since deep cuts in 2010.

He angered workers with whom he had once hoped to reach a contract agreement.

He proposed possible fare increase packages so unappealing — by design, some suspected — that the public’s disdain for the final product, a compromise measure, appeared tempered.

He reinstated the popular “Poetry in Motion” program that published verses in subway cars, but his abbreviated stay left several longer-term projects, like a plan to replace the MetroCard, unfinished on his watch.

He apologized for remarks about a state senator (“he does nothing”), Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (who, “like an idiot” made misguided service predictions after Hurricane Sandy, he said) and a member of his own board, whom he assailed as a liar and challenged to “be a man” during an uncomfortably heated public meeting about the authority’s schedule.

And he remained zealously fixed on possible system disruptions — a man, some suggested, who so thrived in a crisis that at times he seemed to seek one out — investigating subway accidents or delays that might have been handled several levels below him.

That Mr. Lhota pursued the job at all was something of a surprise. After the Giuliani administration, Mr. Lhota spent nearly a decade in private business, as an executive at Cablevision and the Madison Square Garden Company.

Mr. Lhota said his interest in returning to public service did not crystallize until summer 2011, when he was attending a close friend’s funeral Mass and received a cellphone alert: Jay H. Walder, the authority’s chairman, would be stepping down.

“I blurted out, right in the middle of Mass, ‘I want that job,’ ” Mr. Lhota said in an interview.

Once he arrived at the authority, according to members of his staff, he involved himself in minutiae rarely taken up by the chairman, like the speed with which a Long Island medical examiner arrived at fatal railroad accidents and the aesthetics of building designs at the Second Avenue subway site.

“They wanted me to rubber stamp the design,” Mr. Lhota said. “I was not going to rubber stamp something as ugly as what they presented.”

Michael Horodniceanu, the authority’s president of capital construction, mused that Mr. Lhota “would not have done a pyramid in front of the Louvre.”

Mr. Lhota became known for inverting the chain of command in crises, briefing senior officials on their own emergencies.

Mr. Horodniceanu recalled an afternoon last August when an explosion rocked the Second Avenue subway site at East 72nd Street. The first call he received was from Mr. Lhota, who contacted Mr. Horodniceanu several minutes before his own team did.

Mr. Lhota’s record on labor relations — a campaign issue because the next mayor will face multiple expired contracts — is checkered. Board members said that Mr. Lhota benefited at times from succeeding Mr. Walder, with whom Transport Workers Union Local 100, the city’s largest union of transit workers, had often clashed.

Shortly before his nomination was announced, Mr. Lhota called John Samuelsen, the union’s barrel-chested president, with an offer.

“I said to him, ‘You look like a guy who likes hamburgers just as much as I do,’ ” Mr. Lhota recalled.

When their desired restaurant was full, they went next door, sharing an antipasto of salami and cheeses. They ate with their fingers.

“I thought he was pretty decent,” Mr. Samuelsen said.

But the two men were nonetheless unable to reach an agreement on a contract for transit workers.

Mr. Samuelsen said that Mr. Lhota, who called for three years of “net zero” increases in labor costs, suggested in conversations that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, had prevented him from making a better offer.

“He didn’t mind putting the blame on the shoulders of Governor Cuomo,” Mr. Samuelsen said. “He was trying to good cop-bad cop the union off the governor.”

By last fall, as Mr. Lhota was hailed as a hero of Hurricane Sandy, Mr. Samuelsen said, their relationship soured. Some employees were docked two days’ pay for failing to show up for work during the storm, even as service remained fractured by the flooding.

Mr. Lhota said the decision regarding pay was made by Thomas F. Prendergast, who was then the president of New York City Transit and is now the authority’s chairman. Mr. Prendergast, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

Occasionally, Mr. Lhota’s management style also prompted skirmishes with the governor’s office, people close to the Cuomo administration said, with state officials chafing at what they viewed as his penchant for speaking out of turn. Mr. Cuomo likes to control the flow of information from his administration, and one source recalled frustrations in Albany when Mr. Lhota began publicly discussing possible fare increase proposals.

Mr. Lhota played down any conflicts with the governor, with whom he said he had a good relationship, suggesting he was familiar with strong personalities.

“I came from the Giuliani administration,” he said. “This is not foreign to me at all.”

Mr. Lhota’s support for fare and bridge toll increases has become an issue in the mayor’s race — his major opponent in the Republican primary, John A. Catsimatidis, is running television commercials criticizing it — but within the transit authority, Mr. Lhota’s handling of the fare increase was widely regarded as savvy. He presented four options, each designed to generate the same amount of revenue, in a bid to shift the public dialogue from a question that had been settled before Mr. Lhota arrived — will there be a fare increase? — to another he did not mind entertaining — how should it be carried out?

One option included a 30-day MetroCard, at a cost of $125. Two others called for eliminating the bonus on pay-per-ride cards. And transit advocates, always critical of fare increases, concluded that the final compromise, which raised base fares for subways and buses to $2.50 and 30-day passes to $112, spread the pain equitably.

The fare increase, approved in December, would be Mr. Lhota’s last major act as chairman; he announced on the same day that he would resign to consider a run for mayor.

He said last week that his “mind was made up to run in August” — well before the storm that has been seen as the springboard for his campaign — but that he “didn’t know how to pull the trigger” until after Hurricane Sandy.

And even the specter of a campaign, Mr. Lhota noted, did not affect his decisions at the authority.

“Obviously not,” he said. “I did a fare and toll increase.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Candidate Ran M.T.A. (He Doesn’t Dwell on It). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe